Social Dreaming is a method for discovering the social meaning and significance of dreams through sharing them with others. It starts from different assumptions than individual, therapeutic dreaming

This is done by the deliberate and sustained method of free association and amplification through the Social Dreaming TM Matrix. Matrix was chosen from the first attempt at Social Dreaming because it was intuited by its founder, Dr. Gordon Lawrence, that this configuration best fitted the dreaming process.

From the inception of Social Dreaming the systemic nature of dreaming was recognized and affirmed. Not only do dreamers dream from their ecological niche, but also they dream themes that are systemically related.

Social dreaming is also a uniquely experiential discipline, which frees participants from their personal defenses that constrain free-thinking and interaction in ordinary social situations.

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Dreams have always served as wonderful texts for all kinds of reasons. Freud viewed the dream as a disguised representation of repressed ideas that had been evoked by the events of the dreamer’s day, and this view allowed him to break up the image of the dream through a process of free association that revealed a quite extraordinary simultaneity of many thoughts moving along an infinite psychic chain. Gordon Lawrence uses the dream as a pretext for a group’s analysis of social issues, thereby allowing any group to share the dream as a sample of social life, of a society dreaming its own issues. Lawrence’s perspective is a wonderful invention and sure to last.’ Dr. Christopher Bollas, Psychoanalyst and author.

‘Social Dreaming constitutes a remarkable innovation by transforming the hidden world of dreams into social data available for pattern recognition and social information. It is like taking a temperature reading of our social temperament at any given time and offers the opportunity to examine, in real time, the comparative environments across the globe. If the world is a global village, Social Dreaming is a means to understand its current emotional state.’ Dr, Irving Borwick, Organizational Consultant, New York and Brussels.