Hello Dreamers,
By now, you’ve likely noticed that each of us who attended the last planning session on the 25th February is contributing an update to the collective. But before I begin with my account, I wanted to share some logistics for our next Dream Ecologies collective public meeting:
When: Tuesday 11 March, 6–8 pm. Where: The Glade, Dartington’s North Woods (directions linked here)
This will be our first outdoor session of Dream Ecologies, so please dress warmly, wear suitable shoes and bring a torch if you have one. If you’d like to walk together, we will be leaving the Radical Ecology studio (next to the Almond Thief bakery in Shinners Bridge) sharply at 5:40pm to head to The Glade. Otherwise, we’ll meet at The Glade at 6pm.
When Ashish first invited David, Natasha, or me to take on the role of updating the group on our meeting, I sensed some hesitation in the room. Not out of reluctance, but because there was a real feeling of mutualism and collaboration in the discussion we had just had. It was made meaningful by the range of perspectives present. We had just come to the decision that David, Natasha, and I would co-lead the next public matrix, and I felt unsure if I could do justice to that conversation in my own reflection. Interestingly, the thing that then stood out to me from the session was our discussion about how and why we reflect. Why do we look for patterns in our dreams and in the collective dream space? Now, in our written reflections, we’re each noticing different patterns. In a way, Dream Ecologies is a practice of pattern-making, whether outwardly shared or formed within us.
Before the session officially started, while enjoying the miso soup kindly made by Ashish, Natasha and I were having a conversation about her practice in dramatherapy and her experience facilitating story-making sessions with adults living with brain injuries. During these sessions, Natasha invites participants to share any story, and while pattern recognition isn’t the session’s primary intent, she often notices recurring themes. In this way, she cultivates her own internal space to connect the stories shared.
In many respects, our experiences as facilitators for Dream Ecologies have been similar. We have been present not just to hold the space but to listen, absorb, and digest what is shared. However, as both Ashish and Natasha pointed out, what we have not yet done is bring our observations of patterns and reflections back into the commons, an essential part of the original practice of a dream matrix. Between Natasha and Ashish, the structure of the original dream matrix (as developed by Gordon Lawrence and Paddy Daniel) was described in detail. From my recollection of the conversation, the first stage involves sharing dream recollections and their associations, anything that comes to mind. The spatial arrangement follows a star pattern. Chairs are set in groups of three?, all facing away from each other, so participants never make eye contact, but still feel intimately close to one another. The role of the facilitator is to record the unfolding dream sequence while also noting emerging themes, patterns, and the presence of dreams in our waking state. In the second stage, participants and facilitators have an open-ended discussion based on their observations of the dream sequence that just unfolded.
There was consensus in the room that reflection (the pattern-making process) was something valuable to bring into our public sessions. Ashish pointed out that the collective had previously made a conscious decision to avoid this to ensure we weren’t over-analysing dreams, as we don’t want that to become the matrix’s sole focus. But at just the right moment, David navigated us towards one vital question: Why is Radical Ecology, an organisation that centers climate and racial justice, engaging in a project about dreaming? It was just the right question at just the right time.
So, why is Radical Ecology, an organisation that centers climate and racial justice, engaging in a project about dreaming?
David mentioned the word ‘ecology’, prompting us to explore what ecology means and what the ecology of the dream space is. Natasha noted the slipperiness of a word like ecology - how it could be used to describe natural systems but also social systems. I remember reflecting on how the matrix connects the dream space back to the waking world, and how the two inform each other. I realised that Dream Ecologies had changed the way I dreamt at night, how my dreams of lifeforms and place were becoming more frequent, and how I could remember my dream worlds more intimately and vividly than before. David resonated with this and shared a dream he had just the night before. If we’re engaging in this work with the understanding that dreams express what is happening culturally, then the simple act of remembering them better and being more attuned to this space in our waking life already, in itself, feels profound.
We raised many questions, not answers, but reflections to carry into the next planning sessions. We questioned whether it is time to revisit the idea of working with dreams as data. We questioned how we should be seated in the space. We questioned the role of the scroll moving forward and how we continue to work with it. Do we continue to work with it? We also discussed dreaming as a durational practice, and how each public session might inform and build upon the next. Does this diminish the original intent? Does it enrich it?
Among us, and in different ways, we acknowledged the animacy of the spaces from where dreams are shared. We concluded that the space where the session is held isn’t just a backdrop, it has a liveliness and affects the way dreams are told, what dreams are told. We recalled the movement that Sarah introduced in the first matrix and how it allowed us to engage with this, de-center ourselves, and attune to the liveliness of our environment. Whether it was sensing the temperature of a window, crawling under a table, or simply walking, these movements released something within us. “It conditions the dream telling” David said.
As it neared 8pm, we realised we needed to quickly decide how we would organise our preparation for the next public session. I sensed a desire from Natasha to experiment with and bring in the reflection stage from the original social dream matrix format, and an interest in how we hold this as facilitators. How we ensure that everyone feels safe in the space, and how we manage both boundaries and openness. David’s story about the Cedar trees outside the studio got me thinking (please look at his account for this!), particularly his invitation to say “hello” to them during one of our sessions.
I tentatively suggested that we might hold our next dreaming session in North Woods, a local post-plantation woodland of redwoods and Douglas firs that kind of breaks systems of categorisation and dominance. This is because, over time, people have come to understand it for its many different values - biodiversity, economy, and human health. We, Radical Ecology, have been working with North Woods for some time now, exploring our work as artists might bring about change to the ways we practice nature recovery.
Dreams might sometimes be perceived as a luxury in a world that is experiencing immense violence, injustice, and grief. But dreams are also a space of agency. They come from within us, yet they are entangled with the world around us. Which I hope, reveals their nature as relational, not just instrumental.
How will we listen to and tell our dreams - to each other and to North Woods?
Warmly,\
Iman