For years the dreams I dreamt slipped through my fingers as soon as I woke. I kept wondering why they wouldn’t stay, as much as I wanted them to…and then I realised I was the one disconnecting. Expecting them to linger in my rational brain as if by magic. You see, when we dream, we’re in the drift space of the Default Mode Network (like a flow state) and when we’re awake and in ‘doing mode’ another area of the brain called the Executive Network is leading.
This distinction helps to keep our autobiographical self intact, our sense of who we are within the ordinary limits of space and time. It is however possible to find a bridge, and the more we commit to building a relationship with our dreams, through a process of Intention and Writing Them Down, the more they linger and start to share their strange wisdom. I’m going to be teaching this approach soon in a 10 day email series called Dreams Decoded, but for now, I’d like to lean into the model of Social Dreaming that has become so core to my practice.
Dreams feels definitively real in the moment and yet when we’re outside of that realm, they’re nowhere to be found. Where do they go, and where do they come from? How can we get to know them? Their nature is formlessness, while simultaneously rising from the form that we are.
The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul.
C.G.Jung
Dreams are where the unconscious speaks — revealing glimpses, and sometimes whole sweeping chapters of deep feelings, and hidden knowledge. Dreams surface our raw emotions, our forgotten experiences, our ancestry, our blindspots, and all the shadows of our humanity we might be ready to see. But when they appear they do not speak in ordinary language. They come as image, symbol, fragment, mood and landscape, like wild creatures that must be welcomed in, not explained away. Their form of expression is beyond us, but their compass is our own soul.
There is something within us that knows who we are supposed to become. And in our dreams, we see evidence of that, and when we learn the symbolic language of dreams, we can get better at following or living in harmony with that ordering principle.
Toko-pa Turner
In Western philosophy and practice, dreamwork has been a solitary endeavour — one-to-one therapy, analysis, interpretation. Valuable, yes, but limited to the individual mind. There is another way. In 1982 at the Tavistock Institute, Gordon Lawrence discovered the method of Social Dreaming: bringing people together to speak dreams aloud, not to interpret them, but to release them into a shared field. In this unusual practice, “The dream is not owned by the dreamer alone. It belongs to the matrix in which it is shared”, Gordon Lawrence.
I call my own way of leading Social Dreaming, Dreamweaving — in honour of the unfolding: threads of our dreams, when shared, reverberate between us and stitch together a bigger picture of our world. An experience that is more than the sum of its parts.
In a Dreamweaving session, we speak dreams without analysis. They are offered into the space as they are — fragments, images, memories and associations. Like placing paper lanterns on the river of life and watching them drift together downstream. Simple. Ritualistic. Alchemical.
When we’re working online, we gather to begin the session and turn cameras off, leaving us connected by audio alone. Dreams are spoken into the dark, and into the collective ear. A dream of birds might meet a precious memory of feathers collected with a father years ago. Threads begin to weave. We follow them where they lead. In the second half, we turn cameras back on to reflect together on what has emerged, and begin to integrate its meaning — not to explain, but to witness and receive: the symbols, the textures, the resonance between us.
Dreaming is the psyche’s way of thinking, feeling, and imagining experience that could not otherwise be thought.
Thomas Ogden
This is exactly what emerges in Dreamweaving: we create a space where the unthought known can be imagined together. And what happens is more than ‘dreamwork’. Dreamweaving disrupts the idea of ourselves as separate, private beings, and reconnects us to the collective field. Each session has its own character, and ebbs and flows throughout the experience itself — sometimes iridescent, sometimes unfamiliar and melancholy.
Words can’t do it justice. I can articulate the framework, the history, the method. But the real encounter only arrives by stepping into the space itself — with curiosity, willingness, and openness to the unknown.
If what I’m sharing here intrigues you, I’m offering a Dreamweaving session (online) this week:
Wednesday 24th September
7:30–9:00pm UK time
And you can book your place here ↓
Participants often describe the experience of Dreamweaving as unlike anything they’ve known before:
“Dreamweaving was the most vulnerable and authentic experience I've ever lived. Sharing our dreams in such a way allowed me to connect to my deep feelings and desires far beyond any shame or fear that had held me back in the past.”
— Anna
“With Dreamweaving, the revelation didn't just come through me talking about my own dreams, it was the weaving and coming together of others' dreams and stories that surfaced the bigger depths of the reality I was experiencing — which in turn allowed me to realise the sheer futility of my attachment to my past.”
— Takako
“Dreamweaving taught me that there is a vast subtle and imaginal world. I have fallen more deeply in love with this place. I have also a greater appreciation of the interconnectedness of life — what a gift”
— Kat
Dreamweaving shows what is possible when we enter the collective field of dreaming. Dreams Decoded is my free 10-day teaching designed to help you begin building that relationship for yourself. It will be released soon — sign up here to be among the first to receive it →
I’m so excited to read Dreams Decoded 🤩