This past week, my attention has been drawn to dreamy imagery on Instagram: surreal landscapes, flowers, the work of my dear friend Laura Gheorghita. I'm in desperate need of beauty.

So when Jennie McShannon suggested a "social dreaming" session for our regular Thursday meeting with the Point People collective, my most precious group of thought partners, I felt a whole body "yes". After a series of hard weeks, "social dreaming", whatever it was, seemed like what I needed. It sounded like a way to pause together, a collective nap, the safest of spaces.

Mysterious and complex, dreams have often been used throughout history as tools to navigate the meaning of life. Freud called them "the royal road to the unconscious". In 1998, Gordon Lawrence developed a method for working with dreams called The Social Dreaming Matrix. It was inspired by the dreams of Jewish citizens in Germany and the collective context they carried. 

Jennie introduced the method and we turned our cameras off, what bliss. The rules were simple: one person would share a dream they had experienced and the group would offer associations the dream sparked in return. No comments or questions, just associations. We shared dreams and associations for 45min in a quiet, meditative space. After the session, we slowly turned our cameras back on to unpack what we learned as a collective. 

Since then, I have been thinking about how communities share a not only common ideas and ideologies, but language and yes, collective consciousness. Maureen O'Hara, co-author of Dancing at the Edge calls this the "psychosphere" - the interconnected, mutually influential system of meaning shared by individuals and groups. 

Welcome to the Matrix.

Contemplations

• I have been reflecting on the importance of collective action and how it creates collective identity (what you might call the "essence" of a group). I've been thinking of something I read in the brilliant book And then, You Act by theatre director Anne Bogart: 
  
  "If you recognise that your voice contains all the voices that came before you, then you will realise that when you speak you do not speak alone. All the people who made your presence possible on earth speak with you. When you begin to recognise and understand where your voice comes from and begin to explore this, you will realise how immense that voice really is."
   
• This also made me think of director Jerzy Grotowski: 
  
  "It is not theatre that is indispensable, but: to cross the frontiers between you and me; to come forward to meet you, so that we do not get lost in the crowd - or among words, or in declarations, or among the beautifully precise words."

Celebrations 

• Very excited about this Department of Dreams event by Atlas of the Future on June 22nd. Curated by Cathy Runciman and featuring Point People Abby, Ella, and other amazing speakers.
   
• Abadesi and the Hustle Crew have launched a new membership with weekly resources and monthly workshops to help people in tech support Black founders and coworkers.
   
• Justin and the team at Working Not Working have collected a great list of anti-racist resources and are supporting The Allyship & Action Summit which has amazing content and one of the best websites ever.

Correlations

• I attended a fantastic (virtual) event on navigating uncertainty from Ella and Cassie - two of the Point People founders. The event brought together the authors of the beautiful book Dancing at the Edge mentioned earlier: Maureen O'Hara and Graham Leicester. People I gravitate towards are people who work with complexity. They often operate on the edge of systems and create change in a way that Maureen calls "social acupuncture". It felt so comforting to be in a room with people who "get it" (and so nice to see some of you there!). What I loved most is when Graham explained the difference of being "on" the edge and "at" the edge. If you are "on" the edge, it's quite dangerous, you can fall off at any moment. But when you are "at" the edge, you have agency. You are in control of how close you get to the edge, when you need to draw back, when you need to rest, when you want to be alone and when you need to find company. 
   
• Speaking of navigating uncertainty, I attended a beautiful talk by a Parsons professor called Lisa Norton (thanks Nitzan!). She spoke about “lovingly taking away the frames” of our experience to discover something new. She calls this the “uncertainment”.

Conversations

• We are walking through corridors of experience and finding each other in different rooms.
• Do you ever feel like you're selling flowers at a fish market?
• What's intimacy at scale? 
• It's so important to have groups who to do sense-making with, to be in regular conversations with.