Dear Dreamers,
We held our third public session at the Radical Ecology studio on 4th February. Tallula led the session with support from Iman and Sara M. There was soup, which Sara made and brought, and bread, which we bought from the Almond Thief downstairs. Iman produced the consent forms that had been used in previous sessions and distributed them to people coming into the space for the first time. The session was recorded in part. The recorder batteries died about 30 minutes into the session, so that is all we have.
From this group, Natasha and Kate were both there – great to see you both after some time! - so six of us altogether from here holding the space and I think four additional participants – one of whom I had invited personally and three, I think, who knew Tallulah and had come to the space as a result of that prior connection. Dharma, my dog, was also there – quite disruptive I thought, though I got the sense that the participants he showed the most attention wouldn’t have had it another way. Do correct me, if I got the wrong impression…
We sat, throughout the session, in a circle, which was effectively a break from the form of earlier public sessions and so something we might want to talk about at next Tuesday’s meeting of this collective. Tallula offered a quick introduction to the session and its roots in her own somatic practice. Iman introduced Dream Ecologies and then we went into a first exercise where we were invited to lightly touch a part of our body while Talllula guided us into a meditation on cellular breathing – the awareness of the liquid state – an “inner sea” – in which our cells exist and move and respire, an internal respiration that, according to the artist Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen, serves as the foundations of our external respiration and our connection to the planet.
We then moved into a writing exercise where we were invited to reflect on “dreams of place”. The scroll, which had been laid out at the beginning of the session, but placed on a table outside of the circle of chairs, was referred to here and Tallula herself got up and engaged with it, but individual sheets of paper and clipboards were also handed out and most people remained in their seats and wrote onto the sheets of paper they had been given. After some time, we were asked to stop writing. Candles were lit and placed in the centre of the room, then moved up onto the table to spare Dharma’s tail. We moved into a final exercise where balls of clay were handed to each of us and now Tallula led a meditation on listening, drawing attention to the larynx and the patterns of the ear and reading from texts including by Rudolf Steiner and from the book, “Embryos, Galaxies and Sentient Beings: How the Universe Makes Life” by Richard Grossinger. Throughout this meditation, we were invited to play with the ball of clay in our hands and let the clay lead us towards the shape it was to manifest.
Tallula closed the session by opening it out to invite a sharing of dreams or reflections that had surfaced during the hour that had passed. We talked about dreams and pregnancy and wondered whether the dreams of a mother are experienced, and if so how, by the unborn child and whether the dreams of the unborn child are experienced by the mother. Someone spoke about pregnancy and the recognition at times that some dreams that were coming through almost certainly did not belong to them but to the child, that one might carry the dream of another. We considered the experience of an unborn child in the room and that in the mind of that child this whole conversation and this gathering must be perceptible, but really a dream, and that we were all here somehow characters in the dream of this unborn child.
We spoke about time. Someone spoke about dreaming a dream of place only to find themselves days later standing in that place and someone spoke about a practice of dreaming and writing down the dreams for years only to discover what a commonplace it was for dreams to anticipate or prophecy and that this had nurtured a conviction that the ordinary, causal conception of time and temporality that we inhabit is an illusion, while others reflected how dreams aren’t exactly prophecy and that how, the moment we take them as such, they make us a fool.
The collective will meet this coming Tuesday (25th) at the RE studio, 6-8pm as usual. Iman is signed up to lead the next public session on March 11th, but we haven’t as yet identified who will support her in this. We’ve got another meeting of the collective tabled for March 25th, ahead of a public session at the Thelma Hulbert Gallery in Honiton on April 12th, which has been billed as family friendly, and will take place in the afternoon as part of a public programme for my exhibition, Sensing the Planet. Other elements of that programme will include a conversation with Joy Sleeman, who is director of research at UCL Slade and a bit of an expert on Land Art, and a keynote by Francoise Verges. It would be great to know who is around and up for facilitating on this day.
I’ve also mentioned that I’ll be shooting a long interview with the editor of the Red Book, Sonu Shamdasani, at the studio from Good Friday to Easter Sunday. If anyone would be interested in volunteering as crew for all or a part of this 3-day shoot, let me know!
Best, Ashish