Shelly Goebl-Parker is an Art Therapist. This Saturday, she and artists Hap Phillips and Nita Turnage will lead a Social Dream Matrix. Find out more from Shelly:

Human beings have shared dreams with one another for as long as we have been human.  Social Dreaming is a large group “method for capturing dreams”.  Described as an “opportunity to share one’s dreams with others in a matrix.  The focus is on the dream not the dreamer” that was developed by Dr. W. Gordon Lawrence (2005), a British group psychoanalyst at the Tavistock Institute in 1982.  Dr. Lawrence went on to develop and use the process largely for consulting with businesses and supporting work on visioning and dealing with shifts and changes in organizations, training people to use this process in many venues (1998). 

 
St. Louis art therapist Dr. Carol Lark encountered a Social Dream Matrix at an international conference for group psychotherapists.  She brought this experience back to St. Louis and to her professional communities, eventually combining the experience with art process. She gathered a group of artists in the fall of 2008 to meet and engage in a project she called Artists as Visionaries.  She was curious about this way of working having an impact on artists’ creative process.  After beginning work in the fall of 2008, this group continued meeting in the studio she set it up in – even past her original leadership and eventual passing from leukemia in 2009.

 
This group of artists continued to meet together and with others to facilitate and experience social dreaming and art making together in various venues.  From the dirt mound near the Mississippi River during the outdoor arts festival, ARTICA, to the Community Arts Training Institute, our group of dreamers are interested in continuing to share this community building experience.  Social dreaming “creates an ‘opening up’ of the unthought and the difficult and this then becomes a fascinating journey which does not have answers but leads to a flowering of the mind that is the nature of the creative and the nature of dreaming” (Zarbafi, Clare, & Lawrence, 2007, p. 131)
 
We invite you to join us for our version of the Social Dream Matrix followed by art making on three Saturdays during Dreamscapes: April 9, May 14, and June 11 beginning at 1 PM.--Shelly Goebl-Parker

References

Lawrence, W.G. (2005). Introduction to Social Dreaming. London: Karnac Books.
Lawrence, W.G. (1998). Social Dreaming @ Work. London: Karnac Books.
Zarbafi,A., Clare, J. & Lawrence, W.G. (2007). “Don’t explain, just go”: the creative process and Social Dreaming in G. W. Lawrence Ed. Infinite Possibilities of Social Dreaming. London: Karnac Books.