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The Dream Society: Collaboratively writing as a space for possibilities.
Donata Puntil1, Melissa Dunlop2, Emma Macleod-Johnstone3, Angeliki Skamvetsaki4, Mark Price5, Kamen Petrov6
1King's College London, United Kingdom & Psychodynamic Psychotherapist; 2Independent Researcher, Interpersonal Psychotherapist and convenor of CANI Net; 3University of Plymouth &; 4Jungian Psychotherapist- Athens Greece; 5St Mary's University, Twickenham; 6Independent Psychotherapist- Barcelona Spain
We are a group of six academics and practitioners in psychotherapy from various cultural and geographical backgrounds, professional affiliations and different, yet similar, therapeutic traditions and practices. We have been meeting weekly online since September 2024 to explore the Social Dreaming Matrix (Froggett, Manley, and Roy, 2015) in dialogue with collaborative writing as inquiry (Speedy & Wyatt, 2014).
The Social Dreaming Matrix was developed in the 1980's at the Tavistock Institute, London, as a way of inquiring collaboratively into contemporary social contexts and socio-political environments, while making room for unconscious processes and processing (Ettinger, 2006; Lawrence 2005). Bringing this method into relation with collaborative writing as inquiry, we discover a common dreamscape, conceivable as a fictional, speculative or imaginary zone that exists alongside our material reality, and in which symbolic processing and meaning-making takes place across multiple sensory and affective registers (Dunlop, 2023).
We are proposing, in line with the conference theme, an interactive workshop to explore social dreaming and collaborative writing with conference participants in a safe and containing space (Ogden, 2004), as an opportunity to play with ideas and to nourish hope in the midst of the current social landscape “in crisis”.
We will invite participants to share recent dream fragments and to explore meaning-making processes evoked by dreams by writing short individual pieces and seeing where they take us. This will be done with the notion in mind that dreams, not the dreamers, are the focus, coalescing together, revealing unconscious and unspoken themes and affective resonances, in a borderspace (Ettinger, 2006) which subtly demarcates the social fabric of our 'radically entangled subjectivities' (Daigle, 2024). We propose collaborative writing as a shared practice for mapping and experiencing new connections, dialogues, affective and embodied sensations, opening up spaces for new social possibilities, enabling our capacities to dream and imagine together.
