Dear Dreamers,
We met at the Radical Ecology studio on the 21st January. In attendance was Sarah B, Sara, Iman, Tallula and myself. Kate and David both sent their apologies.
Tallula had joined the December public session and had then been in touch by e-mail with an offer to share more about her practice called dreaming bodies and organic movement and I had invited her to join this or a future meeting of the collective as the appropriate place to have the conversation.
Since Tallula was joining the collective for the first time, we each introduced ourselves - our interest in dreaming and dreams that extended across land-based performance, the Hebrew priestess tradition, research into the use and value of woodland and jungian psychoanalysis, to reference some of the influences that were named.
We also summarised the process and evolution of Dream Ecologies so far, from our call-out last summer, to first meetings of the collective in September, October, November and our first public sessions or matrices at KARST, Plymouth and then at the Radical Ecology studio in Dartington.
We talked in particular about how an approach to the physicality of dreaming and dream-sharing had evolved through the sessions, informed first by the somatic techniques that Sarah had brought into play, and then by Mark’s comments, informed by his own training with the the process-based techniques of Arnold Mindell, that in turn evolved as an exercise where dreamers sat in pairs and one told their dream while another imitated the movements of the teller and so entered the dream through the movement they observed.
We talked as well about the format of rotating lead facilitators. Sarah B had led the first public session and I had supported her. I had led the second public session and Sara M had supported me (though I argued that in reality Sara had led the session and I had supported her!).
We spoke about creating a space in future sessions to share techniques for facilitation between members of the collective and of developing a lexicon of exercises in that way. We reflected that there what was emerging was not a singular dream ecologies format that would become refined with each new outing but rather a carousel of ideas and approaches, where new ideas for how to run the session could always work in dialogue with the memory of how the last or previous sessions were run.
We agreed that for the next public session (4th Feb), the session would be run by Tallula and Iman, supported by Sara M, who would also lead the next session of the collective on 25th Feb, and that the public session after that (11th March) would be led by Iman supported by Tallula.
We agreed that as a collective we would commit to delivering a dream ecologies session at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton on April 12th as part of the public programme of my exhibition Sensing the Planet. It would be good to be aware of who can join and help facilitate this session and we can pin things down in terms of format at the meeting of the collective on 25th March.
With so much “business” settled early in the meeting there was time to share a dream, which Sarah B did leading us into a conversation about dreams as architecture and the resonance of dreams with world affairs as well as with our private lives and the impulse to interpret dreams and the possibility of not interpreting or even making analogy but of letting dreams be.
Tallula also shared a dream and then described the making of a work of art that had emanated from the dream and only when she got to the end of the telling of the story did she realise that she had never before mentioned that there was a dream at the origins of this process.
We speculated about whether this might even always be the case. That all art originates in dreams and the mechanism of dreaming whether or not we are awake to the connection.
We spoke about how in our dominant culture our dreams remained tucked away - secrets of the soul to be unearthed in the darkness of night or in the privacy of the therapist’s confessional box.
But here they seemed to find a place under the ordinary strip light of the studio. Not strange at all but a fact of life.
I pulled out a copy of Carl Jung’s Red Book that was lying around in the studio and announced that Sonu Shamdasani, its editor, would be here over Good Friday, Easter Saturday and Sunday to record a long interview about Jung and the Southwest, the Black Books and the Red Book, Alchemy, Time and Gaia. We raised the question of how we might engage the dream ecologies collective during his stay.
We look forward to seeing those of you that can make it next Tuesday 4th at Radical Ecology’s studio. 6-8pm. All welcome.
Best, Ashish