Social Dreaming Workshop

Abstract

Social Dreaming is an innovative method, discovered during the 1980s by Dr. Gordon Lawrence, former Director of the Tavistock Institute’s Department of Human Relations. Social Dreaming proposes that dreams be shared in a social assembly, fostering new thinking through free association and amplification of shared dream narratives (Lawrence 1998, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2011). Ancient societies valued dreams as ordinary sources of information as do some currently existing cultures such as the Australian Aborigines. Conversely, psychoanalysis has understood dreams to be conduits for, and to, unconscious material. Straddling the two positions, Gordon Lawrence developed the collective exchange of dreams into a tool to maximise creative thinking, to research the condition of systems and gain access to organizations’ unconscious reservoirs of resources when applied to organizational consultancy.