Dear Dreamers,
Tomorrow we meet again, 6 for 6.30pm til 8pm at the Radical Ecology studio at The Loft, 1b Cedar Units, Webbers Yard, Dartington, TQ9 6JY.
This will be a second meeting of the Dream Ecologies collective since our first public matrix at KARST in October and ahead of our next one, the first at the studio, on 10th December.
We have said that we would use this session to listen back to the recording from KARST. I’ll set this up and we’ll offer bread and soup as usual. The studio is cold now at night so please wrap up warm.
We were joined by new members of the collective, Sara and Mark, who spoke to interests in dreams developed through the Hebrew priestess tradition and the writings of Jill Hammer and process-oriented psychotherapy and the writings of Arnold Mindell.
The presence of newcomers in the group was an opportunity to recap on the progress of the collective since September. This was led by Natasha who also spoke to her own interest in the group as a space separate from therapeutic practice. We spoke about influences including the social dream matrix of W Gordon Lawrence and deep listening methodologies of Pauline Oliveiros, while Sarah B spoke of her engagement with the group as an extension of her land-based inquiry, embodiment and performance practice. Tilly spoke of coming new to dreams and of her interest in Ithell Colquhoun and of the attention that the group had inspired for her in day-dreaming. Iman also spoke of coming new to reflection on dreaming and spoke of a personal artistic practice that includes research into the perspective and existence of soil as well as an ongoing inquiry into post-plantation ecology with Radical Ecology. David sent his apologies.
We reflected on the format that, through Sarah’s leadership, we had landed on for the first public matrix at KARST and noted how there had been hesitation at the beginning as only we, the collective had arrived in advance of the start time at 9am while participants were walking in at 9.30am and even later. We had then created a lot of paperwork for them to read and sign as consent before coming in and so there had been uncertainty from Sarah, as lead facilitator, about whether to wait until everyone was ready or just start with the core group and let others join when they were ready. I prompted the latter and in our reflection, since Sara had been one of the latecomers into the space on 19th October, we were also able to explore how it felt to miss the movement work and the spatial work at the beginning of the session and of course Sara confirmed that as she did not know what she had missed it wasn’t a great problem and that she arrived and felt happy to join in. So we resolved to be sharper about beginnings and starting on time, and also about the need for certain roles so that while a core group might go into the space and fire it up, someone would be designated as a kind of threshold guardian, to welcome participants into the space, take them through consent forms and point them in when they were ready.
We talked about other roles - the scribe, for example - but about how we had discovered that, as long as the collective understood what the different roles were, there could be a kind of fluidity about them. Anyone could be a scribe simply by picking up a pen and writing down what was being said or what was happening onto the scroll. Equally, anyone could be the threshold guardian by simply observing the necessity of that role and positioning themselves in the space accordingly. For example, at KARST, Tilly had been assigned this role at the start of the session and then came in. Later, I assumed the role as new participants came into the space. At another point, Natasha took on the role, seeing that it was a role and that nobody was attending to it, simply by positioning herself in a certain place in the room.
There was consensus that the format that we had executed was working for us and that we might return to it over time as monks in a monastery returning to their ritual and we expressed great gratitude to Sarah for the imagination, leadership and care that she had given to the group to get the format on its legs, whilst also acknowledging that to-date she had not shared a dream in the space and that she felt the role of lead facilitator made it difficult to fully participate in the process as dreamer. We therefore agreed the need to rotate the role of lead facilitator and having played the part of support facilitator on 19th October, I agreed to step up as lead facilitator on 10th December. If anyone would like to support me in this, and look to lead in the new year, it would be great to have you come forward tomorrow.
We agreed that the format should be a guide not a dogma, and that we should expect it to shift with the changing emphasis and motivation of each new lead facilitator.
We spoke about IP and advanced a sense of Dream Ecologies as both a public space and an open source technology, not a patent nor a commodity.
That is it for now. Time to go and eat my weetabix. See you tomorrow!
Best Wishes,
Ashish